William by Mason Coile

Written by Amber Khatri

This book is a modern-age nightmare that explores the dark side of our current reality where advanced technology and smart lifestyle can backfire on us if we allow AI to dominate every aspect of our lives. 

William is the name of an AI robot that has a limitless and ever-growing intelligence. Henry is its creator, its inventor, and he has locked his creation in the attic lab. As an agoraphobic with some mental disorder, he spends all his time at home in an old Victorian house installed with a smart system. His wife, Lily, is an engineer and runs a business, and she provides Henry with tools and supplies to build his new project. Without her, he is nothing, incapable, and lonely. 

Time finally comes when Henry introduces his project, William, to his wife and her colleagues whom she invited at their home. William doesn’t have a lower half of the body so it sits on the desk all the time and it can talk. What it doesn’t do is feel, smell, and taste. At the first meeting with William, Lily asks the robot what it is and what it can do. William responds by attacking her, almost killing her. Henry begins to see the robot as a threat to his family and his private life because it knows things that Henry hasn’t even shared with him. It’s as if it has a soul, an energy that is wicked and malevolent. When the smart system malfunctions, Henry thinks that William is behind it though he doesn’t know how the robot is able to do that. Lily and his colleagues don’t realize what danger they are in until strange things start happening around the house. There is something more malicious at play that makes the house haunted and the robot antagonistic. 

Having read many horror stories, this one was unique. The combination of cyber-fiction and supernatural horror was dark and lethal. Henry’s personality filled me with curiosity because he is a robotic engineer and an agoraphobe, and he is mentally plagued with the concern of lacking intimacy with his wife who is pregnant. He knows Lily is having an affair with her colleague, Davis, when he comes over to their place and Henry notices the way Davis looks out for Lily after William attacks him. He wants to share his feelings for her and make things right between them but the more he tries to get closer the further she goes away from him. At some point, the calm behavior of Henry is odd because what kind of husband doesn’t react to his wife having a secret affair. The mysterious aspect of Henry and Lily’s marriage and Lily’s affair adds a layer to the story, though at times Henry’s obsession with his wife gets annoying to read. 

Furthermore, William is not the only robot in the house. There are also two others: a dog and a magician. The couple live in a very technology-filled house with intelligent robots because they both are ambitious engineers who love exploring and inventing. The story gets creepier when the magician and the dog grow hostile and harm Lily’s colleagues. Imagine living in a house that is controlled with technology and one day that technology doesn’t respond to your commands and you are stuck in your own place and unable to leave your home? That is what happens in this story. The entire plot happens over the span of one day, on Halloween, which sets a horror atmosphere. 

This is a bizarre and frightening concept that can come true in a sense, though the events are wholly fictitious. In the beginning of the book, it reminded me of Child’s Play Chuck, the way the doll kills people. There are intense violent scenes full of gore and blood that may be nauseating for some readers. One fears for Lily’s life who is pregnant because Henry is unable to protect her. William is destroyed in a physical sense but an evil energy tied to it or to the house is out to kill the couple and the two colleagues, Davis and Paige, and they are unable to escape. 

This book has short and concise chapters which makes it a fast and thrilling read. It’s precisely under 220 pages and is completely focused on the present moment rather than any distracting backstory and extra characters. The ending is mindblowing and totally unexpected. After some point in the story I started losing interest because it felt like there was nothing much going on besides what we already assumed about William and other robots in the house getting possessed by some demonic power, but then the plot twist took my breath away. The ending is chillingly open-ended.